I have long been running Japanese applications on an English version of Windows XP on my old self-made PC. I built that sucker in early 2003 and it's still going strong. In fact that's an understatement, it's actually my main work machine! I may have had various problems at the beginning with Japanese apps, but have not had any in nearly 6 years. So I had forgotten what it was like.
Anyway, my new Dell Latitude E6500 notebook came with an English XP. I installed Japanese Buffalo wireless client software so it can talk to my Buffalo router, and this software displayed a lot of garbage characters. Later I installed Hidemaru and had the same problem, lots of garbage characters.
I poked around and found the solution:
Control Panel -> Regional and Language Options -> Advanced -> Language for non-Unicode programs
I set this to Japanese, and this solved the problem.
Well, more like tales of life. But the greater part of my waking hours are about tech, hence this title.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Friday, January 30, 2009
Resolution on new Dell notebook
My new Dell Latitude E6500 arrived!
Anyway, the first shocker was that its resolution is so good. Too good, in fact.
In fact it's optimized at 1920 x 1200 px. On a 15.4 inch screen that makes for some very small text! Maybe I'm getting old, but it was really hurting my eyes.
I tried playing with the following settings:
I called Dell tech support and the guy's advice was to leave the resolution at the native 1920 x 1200, leave the font size in 1 above as Normal, and change the DPI in 3 above to 125% or 150%. The font size in 1 is just the fonts, whereas the DPI setting changes the size of everything such as icons.
So I did so, but all the text layout everywhere still looked really sloppy. I was losing hope and was considering returning the machine. I stepped out for a bit to go to the bank and grab lunch... and it occurred to me that perhaps I should try restarting... after all the DPI setting dialog explicitly tells you that some programs won't work properly if you don't. I was just in the habit of not restarting.
So when I got back home I restarted, and lo and behold things displayed quite nicely!
Hopefully this will be of use to whoever reads this.
Anyway, the first shocker was that its resolution is so good. Too good, in fact.
In fact it's optimized at 1920 x 1200 px. On a 15.4 inch screen that makes for some very small text! Maybe I'm getting old, but it was really hurting my eyes.
I tried playing with the following settings:
- Display Properties -> Appearance -> Font size
- Display Properties -> Settings -> Screen resolution
- Display Properties -> Settings -> Advanced -> DPI setting
I called Dell tech support and the guy's advice was to leave the resolution at the native 1920 x 1200, leave the font size in 1 above as Normal, and change the DPI in 3 above to 125% or 150%. The font size in 1 is just the fonts, whereas the DPI setting changes the size of everything such as icons.
So I did so, but all the text layout everywhere still looked really sloppy. I was losing hope and was considering returning the machine. I stepped out for a bit to go to the bank and grab lunch... and it occurred to me that perhaps I should try restarting... after all the DPI setting dialog explicitly tells you that some programs won't work properly if you don't. I was just in the habit of not restarting.
So when I got back home I restarted, and lo and behold things displayed quite nicely!
Hopefully this will be of use to whoever reads this.
Labels:
Dell Latitude E6500,
resolution,
Windows XP
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